When you can’t update your profile photo, send a Tweet, or even sign on to Twitter, it’s frustrating. We know that, and we’ve had too many of these issues recently.

As we said last month, we are working on long-term solutions to make Twitter a more reliable and stable platform. It’s our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this issue, and we have moved resources from other projects to focus on it.

For much more background, J.P. Cozzatti from our engineering team discusses our efforts and recent issues today in a post on the Twitter Engineering blog. In a separate, but closely related post on the Engineering blog, we discuss something we’ve been working toward for some time: We’re moving into our own dedicated data center this fall. This will be a big step forward.

We posted last Friday about the Tweets-per-second (TPS) counts we saw during the first week of the World Cup and the record TPS seen at the end of the NBA Championship game. The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS. However, we caution to call any goals a record this week both because many of the games were played simultaneously with another one and total numbers were fairly similar to the first week when only one game was being played at a time.

However, we are calling the end of Japan's 3-1 victory over Denmark a record that bests the end of the Los Angeles Laker victory over the Boston Celtics (3,085 TPS). When the referee blew the final whistle, we saw 3,283 TPS. (The Netherlands/Cameroon game ended six minutes earlier.)

Early in 2009, when Twitter employed less than 50 people, we faced two different security incidents that impacted a small number of users. Put simply, we were the victim of an attack and user accounts were improperly accessed. There were 45 accounts accessed in a January incident and 10 that April for short periods of time. In the first incident, unauthorized joke tweets were made from nine accounts and attackers may have accessed nonpublic information such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers. In the second, nonpublic information was accessible and at least one user’s password was reset.

Within hours of the January breach, we closed the security hole and notified affected account holders. We posted a blog post about it on the same day. In the April incident, within less than 18 minutes of the hack we removed administrative access to the hacker and we quickly notified affected users. We also posted this blog item about the incident within a few days of first learning about it.

Why are we bringing up these incidents from 18 and 14 months ago that we already told people about? Because the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an inquiry into our security practices related to these attacks and today announced that we've reached an agreement that resolves their concerns. Even before the agreement, we'd implemented many of the FTC's suggestions and the agreement formalizes our commitment to those security practices.

Updated at 3:15pm.

Many Twitter users follow their favorite celebrities, sports heroes, or brands. They often find and follow even more nearby businesses or experts in their industry. And, of course, people also follow friends, family and associates so that they can keep updated on what's happening with them. In fact, one of our most frequent requests from users is how they can find and follow the people they are connected to on their social networks.

Today, we're improving our Find Friends section to make it easier to find and follow the people you already know -- your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn -- who use Twitter. Our Facebook app, which launched in 2007, now shows which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and lets you follow them instantly and save them to a list. The app also lets you post your Tweets to your Facebook profile and now, to one of your Facebook pages too. With the Tweets application by LinkedIn, you can see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app. The app also lets you save your LinkedIn connections as a list, post your Tweets to LinkedIn, and add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

UPDATE: The Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook's end.

We may be a relatively small company of about two hundred employees but we have a global mindset. Twitter is growing very fast internationally these days. In fact, about sixty percent of our usage is outside of the United States. That's why we are honored today that President Medvedev of Russia stopped by our office for a brief tour and his inaugural Tweet.

It was incredibly generous of the President to stop by with such a busy schedule. Recognizing the power of new technology and learning to leverage it to advance humanity in positive and meaningful ways is a powerful display of leadership. It was a great chance for us to share our passionate belief that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact.

Mr. President, welcome to San Francisco and Silicon Valley!

It's been an eventful week for World Cup fans around the globe. Many have taken to Twitter in record numbers to tweet about coaching decisions, referee calls and, of course, goals.

In this spirit, we thought it would be fun (and instructive) to track the top three most tweeted goals of the tournament so far. These goals had the highest Tweets-per-second (TPS) count in the 30 seconds after a goal was scored.

The most tweeted goals of the past week...

1) Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS)
2) Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS)
3) Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS)

Were these all-time Twitter records? Yes, but only until last night's deciding game of the NBA Championship between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics. The Lakers' victory generated a record 3,085 TPS as the game ended.

For context, Twitter currently sees about 750 TPS on an average day and 65 million total Tweets a day.

The Platform team is always excited to see developers' creativity in building cool applications using our APIs. To showcase new and interesting applications built on the Twitter Platform, we're going to periodically feature great apps on our blog. For our first post, we'd like to highlight the @kosmix TweetBeat World Cup site. For all of the World Cup fans out there, you are seriously missing out if you haven't checked this out yet!



The TweetBeat site provides real-time updates from and around the World Cup. You can follow what is being said about the whole tournament, or focus on a specific team and even follow what's happening with its opposition. Not only that, but their Popular Tweets sidebar keeps you informed of what everyone else is talking about and, during matches, which team has the most Tweets.

TweetBeat uses the Twitter Firehose to cluster similar tweets into real-time stories from all across Twitter as they happen. You can use the speed slider to slow down or speed up the flow of Tweets and stories down the page. They have also integrated @Anywhere so that you can retweet the best tweets or follow your favorite Twitter users right from the site, without having to come back to twitter.com.



If you know of other cool uses of the Twitter API, tweet about it and mention @twitterapi or me (@themattharris) and we'll check it out!

From a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October.

What's the problem?
Last Friday, we detailed on our Engineering blog that this is going to be a rocky few weeks. We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we're facing record traffic. We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime, we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.

As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users.

Should Twitter have been ready?
Record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity are never simple to manage. However, we were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn't anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event.

What's next?
Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down. We will not perform this work during World Cup games, and we will provide advance notification.

How can I best keep informed of any future Twitter site issues?
For real-time updates on site outages or major issues, you can go to our Status blog. For most other problems that you may be having with Twitter, follow @Support.

Background on Twitter uptime from Pingdom
A month by month look: http://bit.ly/c3BPRS